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Redirecting a questionable domain to a trusted domain

I have a question! We have 2 domains operating within the same retail sector. One of them is for our bricks and mortar business and the other is a new brand we launched as a nationwide e-retailer. We aggressively built links for the new one and achieved some very good search positioning, where we remained for about 4 months until the google updates of the first half of this year started biting. The domain never received a warning from google or anything, but the links have clearly been devalued to a point where the domain is now virtually buried for the most competitive terms.

However, the domain does still get around 100-200 visitors per day, and has a DA of 38.

We're thinking about a reshuffle that would involve putting the products in to our brick and mortar business website, and redirecting the brand domain to the bricks and mortar domain.

Thank you for reading this far! the question is then, is there a danger of the bricks and mortar domain being tarnished by this? as i said the brand domain hasn't had any notices of penalty from google but it has definitely been hit by updates.

3 Responses

Would handpicking the best links and contacting the sites to ask them to switch their links to your new website be an option? That way you can be more confident of not damaging the new site whilst trying to retain the best of the old sites backlink profile.

If you redirect the domain then the link equity of those pages shall be passed to the new domain.

The level of risk would be dependant not only on the composition of your link profile on the redirected brand site, but also the link profile of the site you are redirecting to. So if it allready has a large and healthy profile, it shall be more resiliant than if it was smaller and under developed due to the redirected links forming a statisticly less significant proportion of the total link profile.

I know thats not really a yes or no answer, but hopefully is usefull in making your decision.

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